It's been a minute — thanks for sticking with us. This edition of Altitude picks back up after a short break, and we're glad to be back in your inbox.

A few things on our radar heading into fall:

We'll be at the annual Beanstalk conference in New York this September, where we're looking forward to catching up with founders and operators in the consumer brands space over good food and better conversation.

We'll also be at the B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas this October — if you'll be around, let's connect.

On the deal side, it's been a very busy summer!

Recently, we’ve realized a steady mix of closed financing facilities and term sheets across lender finance, manufacturing, and specialty consumer brands. Each with its own unique story and adjacently unique solution.

This edition's lead story tackles something we get asked about frequently, the broader macroeconomic landscape. Everyone wants to talk about SaaS multiples and private credit stress, and almost nobody wants to talk about the U.S. government's own balance sheet — even though it's arguably doing more to set the price of capital than anything happening in the private markets.

More on that below!

$20M Senior-Secured Revolving-to-Term Facility. Structured for the auto lending industry to give the borrower a bridge from a growth-stage revolver into a term facility; a key structural feature was a step-down advance rate tied to portfolio performance.

$30M Bank Facility ($20M Revolving / $10M Term). Structured for a private credit lender navigating tighter warehouse pricing.

$7.5M Senior Facility. Structured for a lender in real estate; supported bridge-loan originations and borrowing-base flexibility to accommodate seasonal originations volume.

$3M Revolving Facility. Structured for an advertising technology platform; working capital line to smooth receivables timing against media spend commitments.

$324K Facility. Structured for a consumer brand, focused on women's cosmetic devices.

$25M Term Sheet. Structured for a battery storage company in need of growth capital to fund manufacturing scale-up.

Every conversation I've had this summer eventually gets to the same place. Someone brings up SaaS multiples compressing, or a private credit fund marking down a loan, and asks whether we're finally seeing the reckoning everyone's been predicting since 2022.

It's a fair question. It's also, I'd argue, the wrong one to be spending most of your worry budget on right now.

Here's the thing nobody on those calls brings up:

That's not a SaaS problem. It's bigger than a SaaS problem, and it's already doing the SaaS problem's job for it.

If $930 billion a year in net interest didn’t give you a stomach ache, this will. By 2036, interest payments on debt will grow to $2.1 trillion! Which means that net interest will run neck-and-neck with Medicare (~$2.0tn) and outpace Medicaid (~$1.0tn).

If you’re thinking the government must be paying an APR similar to a credit card, you would be mistaken. These interest numbers are due to the Federal Government racking up $32tn in debt by 2026 and reaching $56tn by 2036, or 101% to 120% of GDP over that same time horizon.

If you are wondering what can be done, it breaks out into two main categories: cutting spending or growing the economy out of the hole.

Since the latter is theoretical, we will focus on the former.

A real-world example was Greece in 2010.

After years of increasing debt and poor economic performance, Greece was forced to institute austerity measures as conditions for government and IMF bailout programs.

Greece had to cut public-sector wages and pensions by close to 40% in some cases, and institute large-scale cuts across nearly every government program it could find.

If that didn't hurt enough, taxes went up across the board too: the lowest tax bracket went from paying no tax in 2009 to 9% by 2016, while the top rate climbed from 42% to 45%, kicking in above just €40,000 a year instead of a much higher threshold.

Here’s another version of this movie.

After the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff, S&P downgraded U.S. debt for the first time — and Treasury yields actually fell, because in a genuine flight-to-safety moment, there's still nowhere else global capital would rather sit.

The counterargument to my thesis writes itself: deficits have been elevated for most of the last two decades without triggering the crisis constantly forecast around them, and equity markets are sitting at record highs right now, seemingly unbothered. Markets have been "wrong" about fiscal doom for a long time.

But there's a difference between a market that isn't panicking and a market that isn't paying a price. It's paying a price — just quietly, through a term premium baked into every long-duration instrument, rather than through a headline crisis.

The 1990s offer the cleaner counter-example: Washington actually ran surpluses from 1998 to 2001, driven by a growth boom and (yes) real spending discipline, and long rates fell meaningfully during that stretch.

Growth and discipline together can fix this. Growth alone, with the current spending trajectory, has not been enough this decade — and the bond market has begun to price in that distinction.

What this means, practically:

For founders and operators, the SaaS multiple story is real but survivable — it's mostly a repricing of hyper-growth assumptions that were already stretched. The deficit story is the one quietly setting your discount rate whether you're aware of it or not.

For finance leaders, don't assume rate relief is coming just because growth is softening. Model your refinancing and revolver renewals assuming term premiums stay elevated longer than the Fed's own dot plot suggests.

For lenders and capital providers, this is a case for structure over speed. Floating-rate exposure and shorter reset periods matter more in a world where fiscal supply, rather than growth expectations, is driving the long end.

The SaaSpocalypse makes for a better panel topic. The deficit is the one actually setting the price of your money.

A sharp piece from Mostly Metrics lays out the problem finance teams are only now confronting: token spend has grown too large to sit in an undifferentiated bucket the way software subscriptions used to.

The framework splits product-facing AI costs (which show up in COGS and investors now expect to see, ideally shrinking as a share of revenue over time) from internal AI usage (which shows up in opex and needs its own ROI discipline).

Why it matters: If you're raising capital right now and still showing 90% pure-SaaS gross margins with zero AI cost line, some investors will read that as a red flag rather than a strength — the absence of "there" there.

Bloomberg's look at "retirement maxxing" describes a cohort of 20-somethings — some in their mid-20s with six figures already saved — treating retirement contributions as much a career cushion as a long-term goal, while embracing visible frugality (the "underconsumption core" trend) alongside it.

Gen Z now holds roughly three times the 401(k) assets Gen X had at the same age.

Why it matters: This is a meaningful, underpriced shift in consumer behavior for any B2C brand modeling discretionary spend assumptions for the next decade of shoppers.

Nvidia announced a partnership with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to mobilize over $500 billion in financing for AI infrastructure buildout, on the heels of reports that Nvidia was separately in talks to backstop a quarter-trillion-dollar OpenAI data center commitment.

Why it matters: When your biggest supplier is also becoming your financing source, that's worth watching closely — not because it's necessarily unsound, but because it concentrates risk in ways that are hard to see until they're not.

Long rates are the story right now, not short rates.

The Fed has held steady, but the 10-year and 30-year Treasury are both near multi-year highs as bond markets digest a wave of AI-related corporate debt issuance and a widening federal deficit.

Equities remain near record territory but have wobbled over the past several sessions as rising yields and oil prices weigh on sentiment.

What it means for capital and deals: Elevated long rates mean refinancing and new originations both get more expensive even without a Fed hike — the term premium is doing the tightening on its own.

For lower-middle-market borrowers, this argues for locking structure and pricing sooner rather than betting on near-term relief.

For consumer and SaaS valuations, a higher discount rate keeps pressure on multiples even where fundamentals are fine.

Transaction activity so far isn't slowing — if anything, the credit and M&A data below shows plenty of capital still moving — but pricing discipline on the buy side is real.

Simile raises $200M Series B at a $2B valuation. The synthetic-user research startup founded by Stanford PhD Joon Sung Park closed a $200 million Series B led by Greenoaks, with participation from Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and CVS Health Ventures — just five months after a $100 million Series A.

The company builds AI-simulated user populations for product and marketing research.

Altitude Take: Speed of the raise (Series A to a $2B Series B valuation in five months) says as much about investor appetite for anything touching AI-native market research as it does about the company itself — and it's a useful data point for any founder wondering how fast capital can move right now when the story is right.

$20M–$50M raises:

Below $20M:

Stripe finalizes deal to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. Stripe has agreed to acquire OpenRouter, the startup that helps companies route between and switch across different AI models, for north of $7 billion — months after OpenRouter had reportedly been valued at $1.3 billion. The deal is a strategic bet by Stripe to deepen its footprint in AI infrastructure alongside its core payments business.

Strategic rationale: As enterprises look to control AI costs by shopping across model providers (see our token-cost item above), infrastructure that arbitrages between models becomes genuinely valuable — and Stripe gets a foothold in exactly the cost-optimization conversation CFOs are starting to have.

Middle-Market Transactions:

Smaller/Undisclosed:

$100M+:

$10M–$100M:

Below $10M:

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